Ep. 73: When a Place Changes You: Michael Hassett & Chiara Colette on Friendship, Service, and the People of Tonga

What happens when a place you never expected to call home changes the direction of your life? For Michael Hassett and Chiara Colette, that place was Tonga.

Michael and Chiara arrived in the South Pacific as Peace Corps volunteers, neither having originally planned on Tonga as their destination. What they found was a culture rooted in community, generosity, and a deeply communal understanding of what it means to care for one another. Years later, when a devastating cyclone struck the islands and they struggled to find an effective way to help the communities they had come to love, they decided to create one.

In Episode 73 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson talks with Michael and Chiara about the remarkable story behind Friends of Tonga, the nonprofit they helped build from a conversation among former Peace Corps volunteers into an organization supporting disaster relief, education, literacy, environmental stewardship, and climate resilience throughout Tonga.

They share what it was really like to serve in Tonga—from language barriers and illness to vegetarian survival on an island where root vegetables and meat dominated the menu—and how those experiences shaped their understanding of service.

But this is also a conversation about a very different model of helping. Friends of Tonga operates on a simple principle: communities lead; they support. Rather than arriving with assumptions about what people need, the organization listens to Tongan communities and helps provide the resources to make locally driven solutions possible.

That philosophy has guided everything from scholarships and literacy programs to rebuilding a cyclone- and earthquake-resistant kindergarten and responding to the devastating volcanic eruption and tsunami that struck Tonga. In the aftermath of that disaster, Friends of Tonga raised $300,000 in just two months and helped fund critical efforts including food distribution, water-tank cleaning, and other emergency needs.

Today, the organization is receiving international recognition as a finalist for a .ORG Impact Award in Environmental Stewardship—one of just 35 organizations selected from thousands of submissions around the world.

Michael and Chiara also talk about an issue that extends far beyond Tonga: what climate change and rising seas mean for Pacific Island nations whose people face the possibility of eventually losing not simply property, but their homeland.

And perhaps most inspiring of all, Friends of Tonga remains an all-volunteer organization. Its board members have careers, families, and responsibilities scattered across multiple countries and time zones. They simply decided that caring about something wasn't enough; they wanted to do something about it.

It's a conversation about service, resilience, community, climate, friendship, and what can happen when a small group of people decides that a problem is worth showing up for.

Sometimes changing the world doesn't begin with a grand plan. Sometimes it begins because somewhere thousands of miles away became a place and a people you couldn't stop caring about.